Happy campers: Schinderle-Clem union takes two weddings

Camper Mason Etter, age 7, adds to the smiles with the bride Meghan Clem and Katie Webb, her business partner at Intertwined Events and camp co-director. COURTESY: APICTURELIFE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY CONCOLINO

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"I wanted to take it all in," Meghan Clem remembers of walking down the aisle with father David Schinderle at Pelican Hill. COURTESY: APICTURELIFE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY CONCOLINO

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ReCreation Camp participants and volunteers celebrate with the couple after the wedding mass. APICTURELIFE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY CONCOLINO

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The couple received their blessing ceremony on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the ocean at Pelican Hill, where their best friends, Mark and Kasia Givenrod, who met as counselors at ReCreation Camp, participated in the ceremony. COURTESY: APICTURELIFE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY CONCOLINO

This is the tale of why one couple needed two weddings, and one "ring security" guard.

Meghan Schinderle was 15 when her mom, Maria, signed her up to be a summer camp counselor so she could knock out the community service hours the Catholic school in her hometown of San Juan Capistrano required. Schinderle could never have imagined when she stepped into ReCreation Camp at the Maywood Center in Orange, run by the Catholic Charities of Orange for people with disabilities, that she'd spent half her life devoted to the program -- let alone that it would lead her to her future husband.

But flash forward a dozen years, and there she is, talking to a coworker in a rinky-dink tech start-up company about her other job as co-director of ReCreation Camp, and her passion for helping people with disabilities. The conversation caught Aaron Clem's attention from across the cubicle; his younger brother, Ryan, had brain damage after being struck by a drunk driver.

He tapped Schinderle on the shoulder. "Can I pick your brain for how to handle these different situations I have to deal with?"

Ever the ambassador, she assured Clem she'd offer any help she could. It turns out they had other things in common apart from caring for people with disabilities: They were both USC grads, both Catholic...and, as it turned out, soon-to-be jobless. The tech company tanked in the rotten economy of 2008 and they got laid off the same day.

Soon the two were "dating, unemployed and broke," Schinderle recalls. She decided to start her own wedding- and event-planning company with her co-director at ReCreation Camp, Katie Webb—who would end up not only being her business partner at Intertwined Events, but helping Clem plan his proposal, and plan the weddings to follow.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First Clem had to get approval. The parental kind was a relative shoe-in for the tall, athletic Clem, who today is gainfully employed at Bank of America and pursing his MBA at Pepperdine. No, the true test was: The campers.

"There's an unspoken rule at camp that you don't bring a significant other unless it's time to run them through the gauntlet and see if they are ready," Schinderle says. "It's the ultimate test of: Is this person going to be in your life? The camp people know that's what you're doing when you bring them. They grill them. It's gnarly. They make them lead cheers and wear costumes, and clean up...stuff you don't want to clean up. Oh, it's good. We see what they're made of."

Clem was made of the right stuff.

"It offered a lot of insight into this much bigger world, where people face much bigger challenges day to day," says Clem, who now serves as a community outreach chair for BofA's disability advocacy network. "It made me feel more confident that I could handle my brother's challenges."

Schinderle says with a laugh, "You know how every girl has the check list in her head? The impossible check list, the one where no guy will ever hit them all? I just kept adding up, 'check, check...'"

The real predicament Clem faced was how to surprise an ultra-organized planner like Schinderle with a marriage proposal. For that he enlisted Webb, who helped him concoct a story about needing to "scout" the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach for a made-up event so he could surprise her with champagne, strawberries and a ring – a 2 carat solitaire diamond in a white gold setting from Luganos Jewelers in Newport Beach.

"He, literally Superman-style, pops out from around the corner, and says 'ta-da!' I start screaming, 'No! No!'"

He says, "No?"

"I mean yes! Yes!"

"Well," he says, "you have to stop screaming so I can ask you properly!"

News of the proposal spread fast among ReCreation campers, who all wanted to know if they were invited. The couple didn't know how they would accommodate all the campers and volunteers as well as family at the nuptials they planned at Newport Beach's Pelican Hill, but they didn't want to disappoint anyone.

Then their priest, Father Steve Sallot of St. Edward the Confessor at Dana Point, reminded the couple he could not perform any ceremony unless they were first married in church. It was Webb who came up with the solution: Have the campers for Mass at the church. The Pelican Hill event would then be a blessing ceremony with family and other friends.

So on Thursday, Oct. 4, the couple, their parents, David and Maria Schinderle and Paul and June Clem, and family were joined by a group of some 120 campers and camp volunteers at St. Edward. Clem's brother Ryan gave a reading with support from Father Sallot, and longtime camper Michael Stark, too mature to qualify as a ring bearer, therefore served as "ring security."

The following day the couple received their blessing ceremony on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the ocean at Pelican Hill, where their best friends, Mark and Kasia Givenrod, who met as counselors at ReCreation Camp, participated in the ceremony. Both times the bride wore a classic design by The White Dress-Rosa Clara, and the groom wore a tux and black leather Converse with their wedding date inscribed on the heel.

At one point in their wedding ceremony, at the end of Mass, the musicians started to play "We Are One Body," a familiar Catholic hymn. "Then, all the volunteers began clapping and joined in. I was sitting at the altar, tears streaming down my face, trying to clap and sing the song, but I couldn't even do it. It hit me that this is family, this is marriage, it is everyone coming together to support and bear witness to our commitment. The details matter—I want the people I love most to bear witness to the most important moment of our lives," says the bride.

And it all started from the camp. "It's given me my best friends, it's given me my business partner, it's given me a way to connect with my husband and my parents. We have found a bond in being a voice for people with disabilities."

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